Sounds & Fury

Clarifying Update

A clarifying update has been made to this post on New York Times chief music critic, Anthony Tommasini (see update of 31 Dec at 2:01 AM).

Twisted Tommasini

(Note: This post has been updated (3) as of 2:01 AM Eastern on 31 Dec. See below.)

Here's the lede graf of New York Times chief music critic Anthony Tommasini's review of this season's Met production of Alban Berg's masterpiece, Wozzeck:

If James Levine could zap himself back in time and conduct the premiere of any opera in history, what among his favorites might he choose? Perhaps the Vienna premiere of Mozart's "Nozze di Figaro." Or the Milan premiere of Verdi's "Otello." How about the Munich premiere of Wagner's "Meistersinger," a work he conducts magnificently? I love the idea of Mr. Levine's giving a sublime account of this humane comedy and forcing the anti-Semitic composer to confront his twisted prejudices.

That the unquestionably anti-Semitic Wagner harbored twisted prejudices is certainly inarguable. But apart from that, if anyone can make coherent sense of that closing sentence so that it in any meaningful and legitimate way can be shown to make sense, and what it attempts to say comport with reality, the real world, and the facts, I'll pay for that person's dinner at the finest restaurant in New York City.

Yes, that's right. Tommasini The Clueless and Incompetent strikes again, and we're only too pleased to (again) make note of it.

(To be perfectly fair, we should also make note that the balance of that review is cogently expressed, and seems well-informed. But then, it should further be noted, we know neither Wozzeck nor Berg's oeuvre nearly well enough to proffer an informed opinion on that.)

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Update (5:33 PM Eastern on 29 Dec): Blogger Alex of Wellsung has something to say about this, as does New Yorker music critic Alex Ross in the comments section of Alex Wellsung's post (which comments section needs to be read). I also contributed a comment to that comments section commenting on Alex Ross's comment which Alex Ross chose to snub by not even acknowledging although he responded to the other comments. I also informed Alex Wellsung of his error, re, Hans von Bülow's Jewishness as did Alex Ross, but my correction (made at almost the precise same minute as Alex Ross's correction, of which correction I was ignorant, but unacknowledged publicly by Alex Wellsung) was made discreetly via eMail rather than in the comments section of Alex Wellsung's post.

Update (10:01 PM Eastern on 29 Dec): Things are heating up (in a good sense) in the comments section over at Wellsung concerning this business. Be sure to click over and read all the goodies. Also, Alex Ross sets me straight in that comments section concerning his putative snub of my comment made note of in the previous update. Just a mere problem of posting circumstance, and no snub delivered or intended. I'm gratified to hear it.

Update (2:01 AM Eastern on 31 Dec): A reader eMails me the following:

I have just read your comment in the comment section over at Wellsung where you say that you would never think of nailing a critic for (and I quote) "mere errors of fact, mere typos or mere slips of the pen", but would only nail a critic who commits errors (and I again quote) "of the sort that betray an appalling ignorance of the subject to hand", yet in your post [i.e., the above post] you nailed Tom[m]asini for commiting [sic] nothing more than a muddled sentence. How do you square that with the statements you made in that comment in the comments section at Wellsung?

The answer is that I didn't nail Mr. Tommasini for his muddled sentence, but for what he meant to say by that sentence. Once one disentangles the muddle, one sees immediately that Mr. Tommasini could have meant to say only one of two things, both of which betray an appalling ignorance of the subject to hand. After only a moment's thought, one rejects the idea Mr. Tommasini could have been making reference to the loony anti-Semitic "coding" theory so beloved of PC academics as one quickly realizes that the idea suggests itself due solely the sentence's muddled syntax. One is then driven ineluctably to the conclusion that what Mr. Tommasini actually meant to say is that James Levine, a Jew, by "giving a sublime account of this humane comedy [i.e., Die Meistersinger]," would force the anti-Semitic Wagner "to confront his twisted prejudices [i.e., his anti-Semitism]." Anyone with but a fairly superficial knowledge of Wagner and his works would have known instantly just how ignorant, even absurd, a notion that is even within the fanciful time-travel scenario set up by Mr. Tommasini because such a person would have known that Wagner not only included Jews within his intimate inner circle, but entrusted the premier (at the Bayreuth Festival, no less!) of his most cherished work — his so-called "Christian opera," Parsifal — to one of them: conductor Hermann Levi; not merely a practicing Jew, but the son of a rabbi. (And according to the best authority that's come down to us, Levi gave what might be called "a sublime account" of the work.)

Do you now understand just how that sentence, muddled or not, betrayed New York Times chief music critic Anthony Tommasini's appalling ignorance of the subject to hand?

Munich, The Movie

No, I didn't see it, and, no, I've no intention of seeing it, thank you for asking. After reading various reports of its corrupt, perfectly imbecile underlying philosophic premise (as the Leftist — way Leftist — playwright, Tony Kushner, is the principal screenwriter, what else could the underlying philosophic premise be but corrupt and perfectly imbecile?), I decided my age-hardened arteries would be better off not being subjected to the insult the steep rise in my blood pressure would inflict upon them. Maybe later via DVD in the comfort and quiet of my own home where my howls of outrage can be freely indulged in and perhaps serve to mitigate the rise in my blood pressure and any consequent damage to my coronary-vascular system.

Strikes One Slack-jawed And Speechless Cum Terminal Priapism

Bugatti Veyron 16.4: 1,001-horsepower two-seater; zero to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds; to 125 mph in 7.3 seconds. Top speed (standard): 253 mph. Braking to complete stop from 250 mph: less than 10 seconds — in a straight line, even absent the driver's hands on the wheel. Price: $1.2 million.

Read all about it (if you can take it; I barely can) here.

The Bloody French Do It Again

Leave it to the French, this time in the person of film director Christian Chaudet, to vandalize utterly yet another masterpiece: Stravinsky's lovely and eloquent fantasy-cum-morality-tale mini-opera, Le Rossignol (The Nightingale). In a computer-animated / live-action film version of Le Rossignol aired by PBS on its "Great Performances" series, Chaudet imposes on the opera a non-stop barrage of frantically busy, socially-culturally-politically "relevant" visual claptrap cum sound effects that clutter and bloat Stravinsky's elegant work almost beyond recognition. What this grotesque and ugly piece of high-tech Eurotrash could not destroy, however, (not totally, at any rate) is Stravinsky's expressively on-point music (nicely conducted by James Conlon), and Natalie Dessay's vocally brilliant nightingale, the sound of which, all by itself, makes suffering through this insufferable hour-long production almost worthwhile. If you missed it this time around, look for a rerun in your local PBS listings. Or better yet, buy the Conlon / Dessay EMI recording that this loathsome film vandalized for its main soundtrack.

Coda

As a sort of coda to this report from Alex Ross, I just got a look at Time magazine's 2005 Best-Of issue (in my dentist's office), and under the heading, Music, guess what.

That's right. Not so much as a single classical music CD or CD set listed.

Why am I not surprised.

Bloody pop-culture-besotted woodenheads.

Have A Merry Nibelungen Christmas!

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:06 PM Eastern on 17 Apr 2006. See below.]

Or so it seems not a few folks will be having if my eMail is any measure.

As I've written a great deal on this blog concerning Wagner and his works, it's not in the least odd that I receive eMail requests fairly regularly asking for CD or DVD recommendations for various of Wagner's operas. But this Christmas season the volume of requests for recommendations for CD or DVD sets of Wagner's tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, has been nothing short of astounding. All by itself that's encouraging. Even more encouraging, however, is that the requests have almost invariably been requests for recommendations for a CD or DVD set of the Ring that would be best for a Ring virgin; i.e., someone who's never before had experience of the Ring. As I'm not out on The Street much these days, I don't know whence this heightened Ring-virgin interest in the Ring arises, but as I've said, it's hugely encouraging, and I'm content not to ask too many questions of my correspondents. So without further ado, as the saying goes, herewith for public consumption is my answer to those requests.

First, forget about DVD. Unhappily, there's simply nothing available on DVD worth recommending at the present time. With the single exception of the now ancient Levine / Metropolitan Opera Ring which is seriously wanting musically on several counts, the only DVD sets available of which I've knowledge are all Eurotrash productions of the Ring; ones not fit for anyone, much less Ring virgins. (Among these Eurotrash Ring DVDs is the mother of them all: the Boulez-Chéreau Ring which is not only a horror production-wise, but musically as well, Boulez being, of course, perhaps the most execrable of the famous Wagner conductors working then as today.) The absence of a first-rate Ring (or Rings) on DVD will change in future, I suspect (or, rather, hope), but for now, that's the deal, and it's no deal at all.

That leaves CD sets only, and the choice here is, happily, an easy one: the stereo London / Decca Solti Ring, even after some 40 years, is still the hands-down choice, musically and audio-wise; not only for Ring virgins, but for all except devoted Wagnerians who make a point of collecting various recorded versions of the work for their CD library. The fine — some even great — readings of the past preserved on record and transferred to CD (Krauss, Furtwängler, Knappertsbusch, Keilberth, Kempe) are all mono recordings, and the audio is simply incompetent to give adequate voice to the Wagnerian orchestra, the most important "voice" in all Wagner's music-dramas. This means that what's missing must be "filled in," so to speak, by the listener, and that's work strictly for Ring veterans, not Ring virgins. Further, the singers on these recordings are invariably miked in an "up-front" manner à la recordings of conventional opera, and there's precious little that could be more wrong or more wrong-sounding than that in Wagner's music-dramas.

Of the other stereo CD sets of which I've knowledge, there are the Karajan, Böhm, Levine, Barenboim, Sawallisch, and Janowski sets. Of these, the latter three simply should never have been released on CD (or recorded in the first place) as none of these conductors are gifted Wagner conductors, and as I've elsewhere asserted on this blog, without a gifted Wagner conductor on the podium nothing can save a performance of a Wagner music-drama from being second-rate at best, and these performances provide abundant testimony for that caveat. As for the Levine Ring CD, like the Levine Ring DVD it's seriously wanting musically, and so can't be recommended. A damn shame, too, as Levine has matured into a Wagner conductor of the very first water; something he wasn't at the time this recording was made. Perhaps in future Levine will attempt it again. If he does, I, for one, will be among the very first in line to purchase that recording.

And that leaves the Karajan and the Böhm Rings, and they're both non-starters: Karajan because of his ludicrous and perverse conceit that Wagner should sound as lyrical as Verdi, and Böhm because, well, he simply doesn't much like Wagnerian Wagner, preferring his Wagner to sound more like Mozart on steroids and speed. Not cool. Not cool at all, especially for Ring virgins.

So there you have it, interested readers. The stereo London / Decca Solti Ring, with the Vienna Philharmonic, and Nilsson, Hotter, Windgassen, et al. In the main, and on the whole, it's the right way to go (and the right thing to do).

And a Very Merry Nibelungen Christmas to you and yours!

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Update (7:06 PM Eastern on 17 Apr 2006): For a mea culpa update to this post, see here.

The Annual Winter Ritual Post

I celebrate this morning (early afternoon, actually: 1:35 PM EST) my annual winter ritual of First French Toast of Winter. Perhaps you'd like to make it your annual winter ritual as well. Piece of cake ... um, challah.

What You Need

(2) large (from the center of the loaf) 1"-thick slices of challah (a good-quality brioche will work too)
(4) strips fatty bacon or (2) medium-size pork sausages
(2) x-large eggs
1/4 cup heavy cream
1/4 teasp cinnamon
1/8 teasp nutmeg
1/4 teasp vanilla extract
(1) pinch salt
1/4 cup (or as much as you want) Grade A Dark Amber Vermont maple syrup

What You Do

Place serving plate into preheated 200°F oven.

Prepare batter by whisking together: eggs, cream, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, and salt. Set aside.

In a heavy skillet, fry sausage or bacon strips (crisp). Set aside on separate plate in warming oven.

Heat large heavy skillet on medium fire. Dip slices of challah or brioche into batter both sides long enough to saturate each side. Add generous pat of butter to skillet, wait until bubbling ceases, then lay in the batter-dipped challah or brioche slices. Fry each side until a mottled golden-brown. Add small pat of butter to one side of what are now slices of French toast and transfer slices to a cutting board, stacked, and cut in half on the diagonal. Arrange the resulting four triangles on the warmed plate. Pour the Vermont maple syrup over all the triangles, add bacon strips to the plate, and serve. (If you want to be fancy about it, you can lightly sprinkle some powdered sugar on the French Toast just before serving. I don't.) Serve with French-roast coffee and a glass of iced water.

Yum!

Happy Winter, y'all!

Souvenir (Administrative Note)

Neat and detailed review of Souvenir — a dramatic essay (play) on the career of the inimitable and notorious but curiously endearing "opera singer," Florence Foster Jenkins — by blogger Maury D'annato of Fisher-Price My First Opera Blog

Worth a read even if you don't know who Florence Foster Jenkins was — or, rather, especially if you don't.

(With this we now add Fisher-Price My First Opera Blog to our exclusive listing of Culture Blogs on the sidebar.)

Another Assessment Of Mozart

In contrast to music journalist Norman Lebrecht's assessment (quoted here) that "Mozart merely filled the space between staves with chords that he knew would gratify a pampered audience. He was a provider of easy listening, a progenitor of Muzak," we have this from composer Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, a then-famous contemporary of Mozart who, in a reminiscence dictated to his son, recounts a discussion he had with Emperor Joseph II, the "musical emperor", several years before Mozart's death in 1791:

Dittersdorf: He [Mozart] is unquestionably one of the greatest original geniuses, and I know of no composer who possesses such an astonishing wealth of ideas. I should wish that he were not so spendthrift with them. He does not allow the listener to breathe, for hardly has one perceived one beautiful idea than another, more splendid, appears on its heels, and this continues without cease until, in the end, one can barely retain all these beauties in memory.

Emperor Joseph: Some time ago I made a comparison between Mozart and Haydn. Compare them for me so that I can see whether your opinion agrees with mine.

D: If I may be permitted a question, How would your majesty compare Klopstock and Gellert [two famous contemporary poets of the time, the latter gifted but conventional, the former considered too complex and profound for ordinary consumption]?

EJ: Both are great poets, but one must read Klopstock's works more than once in order to understand all their beauties, while with Gellert's works all their beauties lie unveiled at first reading.

D: Your majesty has my answer.

EJ: Mozart, then, is like Klopstock, and Haydn like Gellert?

D: Precisely. Or so I believe.

As do I.

From The Inbox

In response to a calculatedly snarky comment I left in the comments section of this earnest and serious-minded post by blogger Alex of Wellsung, which comment read:

You're far too kind — and paying far too much serious attention — to Mr. Sandow, just another typical hanger-on to the hypocritical '60s equalitarian, anti-intellectual, do-your-own-thing mentality, trying desperately to justify his insatiable '60s-"revolutionary" appetite for and devotion to populist trash — the mother's milk of that generation — by attempting to place it on the same footing, and in the same league, with genuine art. There are but two ways to deal with this type: ignore them, or ridicule them — briefly.

reader N.R. eMails me (reprinted here with permission):

I just read your comment on Wellsung regarding Alex's [i.e., Alex of Wellsung] critical post about Greg Sandow's views on pop culture and the crisis in classical music, and it's of course in line with a number of posts on your blog which have had nothing but nasty things to say about Sandow and his ideas. What puzzles me is that your hero, music critic Alex Ross of the New Yorker, for who[m] I've seen nothing on your blog but the highest praise, often takes the same position in his writings concerning pop culture and the crisis in classical music as does Greg Sandow. How is it that you have nothing nasty to say about Alex Ross taking the position he does, but lambaste Greg Sandow for taking the same position?

An entirely fair question. And the answer is, I forgive and disregard Alex Ross's wrongheadedness concerning his occasional championship of things pop cultural in the same way and for the same reason I forgive and disregard Richard Wagner's lunatic anti-Semitism: the nonpareil excellence and importance of their best work.

I trust that answer resolves fully your perplexity in this matter.

This Man Is In Urgent Need Of Help

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 4:20 PM Eastern on 18 Dec. See below.)

Poor Norman Lebrecht. He's apparently fallen over onto the wrong side of the line on which he's been teetering precariously for some years now.

Compare this epiphanic moment of sanity from 2002,

The first months of my Mozart-free year have been aural bliss, eliminating sweetmeats and embracing healthy fibre. I was learning to love Haydn and respect Gluck when, last Thursday at a friend's birthday concert at the Wigmore Hall, they slipped in the Soave Trio from Così fan tutte and I was done for. I wanted more; I craved the crowning sextet that is probably the greatest concerted aria ever conceived.

Talking at dinner to a mathematics professor, we could not between us fathom how, with such simple intervals, Mozart penetrated the very core of the human soul. He is, tout court, a life-force.

with this lunatic effusion from 2005:

The key test of any composer's importance is the extent to which he reshaped the art. Mozart, it is safe to say, failed to take music one step forward. Unlike Bach and Handel who inherited a dying legacy and vitalised it beyond recognition, unlike Haydn who invented the sonata form without which music would never have acquired its classical dimension, Mozart merely filled the space between staves with chords that he knew would gratify a pampered audience. He was a provider of easy listening, a progenitor of Muzak.

[...]

Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours. Beyond a superficial beauty and structural certainty, Mozart has nothing to give to mind or spirit in the 21st century.

Mr. Lebrecht, it would appear, needs urgently to up his meds, and embark upon a long, recuperative rest.

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Update (4:20 PM Eastern on 18 Dec): For another assessment of Mozart, see this post.

Handel's Messiah As Drama

For my eons-ago high school "Freshman Thesis" (an invention of the chairman of my high school's English department who mandated a "thesis" each high school year for all students on the "academic track"), I chose to do a paper on Handel's Messiah, and was admonished by the first source I consulted never to consider Messiah a dramatic work. It was, this source cautioned, a devotional work; a sort of extended anthem unlike Handel's other oratorios, many of which were based on Old Testament stories, whose narratives could be considered dramatic in nature.

I was reminded recently of this by a Handel enthusiast of my cyber acquaintance, who, on a classical music forum, wrote, in part:

Messiah is something of an "outlier," but not so much because of its New Testament origins — [even though] it certainly does include passages from the Old Testament — but because (along with Israel in Egypt) it is one of just two oratorios created from a set of woven-together Bible texts. The remaining oratorios (although many are drawn from Biblical material) are more conventional narratives — let's call them "stories" — with strongly drawn characters, whose humanity is depicted so brilliantly through Handel's music. [...] But, generally, I would describe [Charles] Jennens [Handel's "librettist" for Messiah] as putting together the text of Messiah as a theological / intellectual undertaking. In that regard, the narrative — and human qualities — of other oratorios is missing.

The idea that Messiah is not a dramatic work is hardly uncommon, and that’s always seemed to me to fly in the face of, and contrary to, the clear evidence of the work itself. "Woven-together Bible text" though it may be, Messiah is, I think, by far the most dramatic work Handel ever wrote; more profoundly dramatic than any of his Old Testament oratorios, and certainly more dramatic than any of his operas, its lack of an overt dramatic narrative structure and of named, identifiable characters notwithstanding. Its inherent drama is, in fact, central to Messiah's genius, and one of the principal reasons it's endured in the very special way it has over the last two and a half centuries.

To immediately see just how dramatic it is (assuming, that is, you haven't seen it already), all one has to do is imagine the actions of Messiah's characters taking place in Roman-occupied Jerusalem during that period in Jewish history when Jewish messianic fervor was at its zenith.

Say what? Characters and action? There are characters and action in Messiah?

Indeed there are.

And just who might those acting characters be?

Why, the Jewish citizens of a neighborhood in Jerusalem, that's who. Every chorus represents all of them speaking as the townspeople collectively — severally in groups, or with one unanimous voice — in response to events, or to something uttered immediately before in recitative or recitative and aria. (The single exception is the chorus, "Glory to God", which is a "flashback," so to speak, to the singing of the heavenly host at the announcement of the Nativity to the shepherds; an announcement witnessed and overheard from the sidelines by one of the townspeople who's narrating what she saw and heard to her fellow townspeople.) And every recitative and aria is one of those townspeople addressing his or her fellows as a whole. And when these characters speak, either as individuals or as a group, they express themselves in phrases drawn from Scripture, much as the Gospel writers and Jesus himself were wont to do when occasion called for it.

In point of fact, Messiah, with its "woven-together Bible texts," has one of the most compelling dramatic narratives of any choral work ever written, and its characters (and it has those in profusion), even though unnamed and unidentified, are some of the most human and moving in all of music. Handel's music makes them so.

There's been so much talk recently, in the press and in the blogosphere, about Nikolaus Harnoncourt's new recording of Messiah that I bought the CD set even though I fully expected, given Harnoncourt's card-carrying credentials as a HIP luminary, that his reading would turn out to be nothing other than one more instance of typical doctrinaire HIP idiocy the hallmarks of which are spare, emotionally empty, bloodless readings taken at absurd breakneck tempi. But to my happy and grateful surprise, that's not true of this reading.

Faculty Candidate Application — Rejected

Don't ask. Just click here.

Trust me.

I Swore I Wouldn't Do This, But...

...I simply can't let it go so revealing is it.

Here are two quotes from New York Times chief music critic Anthony Tommasini's review of Tobias Picker's new opera, An American Tragedy, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera this past Friday:

There is a similar heavy-handed moment in Scene 3, when Clyde begins courting Roberta, a sweet, wistful young factory worker in his department. As their voices mingle, we see a flashback with the young Clyde being warned against temptations by his stern mother, Elvira. A quartet begins - a traditional operatic device, effectively rendered. Yet the music, though lushly lyrical and tinged with pungent chromatic harmonies, seems beholden to the dramatic moment, not inspired on its own terms.

[...]

"An American Tragedy" is an effective piece; it works as an opera, you could say. But an opera is also a musical score, and on that level this score does not grab me like those of many operas that work much less effectively.

Hmmm. Perhaps the score didn't grab Mr. Tommasini because much of the music was — saints preserve us! — "beholden to the dram[a]" (or the "dramatic moment", as Mr. Tommasini put it) rather than "inspired on its own terms."

The Times is in urgent need of a chief music critic who, at very least, understands the fundamentals of opera as an art form.

Doesn't seem like too much to ask — or expect.

Hot Stuff!

Our thanks to music journalist and new blogger Steve Smith of Night After Night for alerting us to what appears to be a major new fiddle talent and another hot babe entry in the swelling ranks of up-and-coming female concert fiddlers. And to think that back in the dinosaur era of the '50s conservatory milieu we male fiddle players argued most earnestly that females were simply unsuited to the solo demands of the instrument.

Uh-huh.

Encouraging News

(Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 2:45 PM Eastern on 4 Dec. See below.)

Here, here, and here.

I take their informed word for it, and it warms the cockles of my reactionary, "cultural conservative" heart.

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Update (10:32 AM Eastern on 4 Dec): On the other hand....

Update (2:45 PM Eastern on 4 Dec): And on that same other hand....

Cute?

I take it premier classical music critic Alex Ross thinks this linked schtick is cute. I tend to respond to it rather differently.

Yes, I know. That makes me a regular reactionary, a "cultural conservative" (as one recent eMail correspondent so charmingly charged me with being), and a po-faced old stick-in-the-mud.

On the other hand, I suppose I should take into consideration that the tacky if subtle intrusion is almost subliminal, and that it's only some lame French confection being pop-culturally soiled. I guess that balances the scales.

Let it pass.

Christmas Then And Now

(First posted December 2003, and re-posted annually each December for as long as it seems still pertinent.)

I often wonder this time of year whether my perception of the Christmas season over the last three decades or so is peculiar to me or is in fact a perception in accord with the reality of the thing. The Christmas season, beginning just after Thanksgiving, has forever been my most favorite time of year, and the one (and only) time I wished I were a Christian. Sounds strange, even disingenuous, I know, coming as it does from a deep-in-the-marrow Jew and a by-conventional-definition atheist such as myself, but it's true nevertheless. Until age thirty or thereabouts most of my Christmas seasons were spent — strictly voluntarily and non-professionally — singing in, and at times preparing, various church choirs for concert engagements in churches around the city, as well as for special Christmas concerts in their home venues. The season has always been for me a time of music, both in fact and as manifest spirit, and so it seemed for most of the rest of America, Christian and non-Christian alike. For the better part of the last thirty years, however, the season's manifest spirit, as expressed not only in public music-making but in all manner of public celebration, has, as a national affair, gone largely AWOL.

That lamentable disappearing act occurred by degrees over the years; quietly, insidiously, almost surreptitiously. In searching for an instigating or animating culprit for that slow dissolution one might, for instance, imagine pointing an accusatory finger at the season's increasingly crass commercialization. But Christmas has always been commercialized to greater or lesser extent. The season's tradition of gift-giving fairly guarantees it. And while it's true that the season's commercialization has never been so brazenly and ferociously pursued as during the post-1960 decades, it seems to me that commercialization is not the culprit. Indeed, commercialization was largely responsible for making the season the national public celebration it used to be.

Another suspected culprit at which one might imagine pointing an accusatory finger is that poisonous excrescence known as political correctness. As always, whatever it touches — even if only fleetingly and peripherally, to either admonish or caress — is to some degree destroyed by that touch, and the public expression of the Christmas season — the outward manifestation of its spirit — was certainly no exception. But that outward public manifestation could, I think, have survived whole even PC's malignant touch were it not for another, contemporaneous postmodern development.

Over the past three decades there has developed worldwide what might be called The Great Wising Up; a phenomenon almost wholly attributable to the inexorable forward march of technology, especially as it impacted communications, bringing in its wake the easy and light-speed-fast dissemination of information and knowledge. Hardly a bad thing, you might argue, and I'd certainly have to agree. Nevertheless, for the present at least, there's something quite bad about that phenomenon; the same sort of bad that typically obtains when a life-long pauper, through a windfall not of his own making, suddenly finds himself filthy rich. Through lack of experience, and therefore understanding, he simply has no idea how to manage or even deal with the windfall beyond the knee-jerk response of squandering all or the bulk of his newfound wealth freely and wantonly, with little serious thought given to how it might best be used for his own long-term benefit.

All by itself that would be bad sufficient. But with The Great Wising Up came a more pernicious bad: a dangerous species of hubris that glories in debunking and devaluing all that's impalpable and unkickable; glories in devaluing the transcendent; a relentless demythologizing of all mythologies. And the manifest public expression of the spirit of the Christmas season was among one of its very first casualties. Over the past thirty years that manifest expression has been in the process of dying a prolonged death in this country. Although its still lingering shadow may generally be discerned for the week or so prior to the 25th of each December, it's but its shadow only; a shadow growing more pale and ever more faint with each succeeding year except within the circles of devout Christians for whom nothing would be capable of dissuading the full and public manifest expression of the season's spirit for the season's full term. For we non-Christians and nonbelievers, however, who for an entire month each year used to be able to bask in the reflected glow of that manifest spirit courtesy of its ubiquitous and pervasive public expression, it's gone missing; passed on perhaps forever.

I, for one, mourn that passing, and wish things had worked out differently, but know that such wishing is but a forlorn exercise. So the best I can do is to try each December to engage that spirit for myself — piecemeal, as it were, incident by superficially connected incident — through music alone.* It's not at all the same as engaging it communally nationwide through conspicuous, coherent, genuinely felt public celebration as in times past, but as there's nothing for it, it will have to suffice.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

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*First up this 2005 Christmas season, Chanticleer's Sing We Christmas, with music by Bach, William Billings, Franz Xaver Gruber, Jacob Handl, Holst, Herbert Howells, Ives, Josquin, Hieronymus Praetorius, Michael Praetorius, Enrique Ribo, Steven Sametz, Tomás Luis de Victoria, and the ever famous Anonymous.